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Govt to sanction BlackBerry for outage
The Indonesian government is preparing sanctions against Blackberry after a recent outage left millions of Indonesian customers without access to some services
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T
he Indonesian government is preparing sanctions against Blackberry after a recent outage left millions of Indonesian customers without access to some services.
Communication and Information Ministry spokesman Gatot Dewa Broto said, as quoted by Bloomberg, the sanctions were pending BlackBerry's report into the disruption and the government would also consult the nation's telecommunication regulatory board to see whether the incident violated any regulation.
'We don't want to be seen as allowing this to happen time and time again,' Gatot said, adding that the latest incident was the fourth outage for BlackBerry since April 2012.
Indonesia has imposed sanctions on BlackBerry before.
In September 2009 the government ended a two-month freeze on issuing licenses for new BlackBerry models after it opened a service center in Jakarta. The Communications Ministry in June 2009 halted licenses for sales of new BlackBerry models pending the opening of a local branch office with after-sales service.
The latest outage, which affected the popular instant-messaging application BlackBerry Messenger, may hinder the company's efforts to sustain its market share in the world's fourth-most populous nation.
BlackBerry has about 6.3 million subscribers in Indonesia, up from 6 million in 2012 and 5 million in 2011, according to Gatot.
The service interruption primarily affected Web browsing, social networking and BlackBerry Messenger, Matt Stewart, a spokesman for the Waterloo, Ontario-based company, said.
